Affiliate marketing is a marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for visitors or customers brought about by the affiliate's own marketing efforts. In the context of online marketing and e-commerce merchants, affiliate marketing can be viewed as a method of using one website (maintained by an affiliate) to drive traffic to another website (typically an e-commerce merchant's website).
The e-commerce merchant is typically a brand-name retailer of goods and/or services, such as Amazon.com (provided by Amazon.com, Inc. of Seattle, Wash.), Newegg.com (provided by Newegg Inc. of City of Industry, California), Zappos.com (provided by Amazon.com, Inc. of Seattle, Wash.), and the like, that offers a merchant affiliate program. E-commerce merchants may also include lead-based businesses, such as insurance companies, credit card companies, mortgage and/or financial product companies, online university programs, “daily deals” services, and other like business that offer merchant affiliate programs.
An affiliate that participates in a merchant affiliate program may seek to direct traffic to the e-commerce merchant's website using advertising methods such as organic search engine optimization, paid search engine marketing, e-mail marketing, display advertising, and the like. Other affiliates may seek to direct traffic to the e-commerce merchant's website by publishing content (e.g., news, reviews, and the like) related to the goods and/or services offered by the e-commerce merchant.
Many merchant affiliate programs place restrictions on the marketing methods that affiliates are allowed to use. For example, it is common for merchant affiliate programs to forbid affiliates from bidding on search terms that are closely related to the merchant's brand. For example, the Zappos Affiliate Program forbids affiliates from bidding on brand-name search terms such as “Zappos”, “Zappos Shoes”, “Zappos.com”, or variants thereof (e.g., “Zapppos”, “zapos”, and the like). Similarly, the Amazon affiliate program forbids affiliates from bidding on brand-name search terms (or variants thereof) such as “Amazon”, “Kindle”, and the like.
For example, FIG. 1 illustrates an exemplary search ad 105 displayed in a web browser window 100, as is known in the art. As shown in the example, a user has searched for the term “Zappos”, and in addition to providing a number of “organic” search results 125A-B for that term, the search engine has also presented an ad 105, typically because an advertiser (possibly an affiliate of the merchant Zappos) has bid on the search term “Zappos”. Ad 105 has several components, including a display Uniform Resource Identifier (“URI”) 115 and a clickable link 110, which includes an anchor (here, the text, “Zappos.com—Free Shipping Both Ways at Zappos” is the anchor, but an image could also be an anchor) as well as a target URI (a portion of which is previewed in status bar 120). Many online advertisements include similar components.
If an affiliate who participates in Zappos.com's affiliate program bid on the search term “Zappos” in order to have ad 105 presented to users who search for that term, then that affiliate would be in violation of Zappos.com's terms of service for its affiliate program. If an investigator identified the rogue affiliate to Zappos.com, the rogue affiliate would be subject to expulsion from the program and/or withholding of unpaid revenue shares. However, many rogue affiliates go to great lengths to hide their affiliate IDs from discovery, including employing monitoring-detection techniques and exhibiting deceptive behavior when monitoring is detected or suspected. Consequently, existing solutions are frequently unable to trace a given ad back to a particular affiliate. Moreover, once a particular affiliate has been identified, many ad networks do not provide a mechanism for determining whether a given affiliate participates in a given merchant's affiliate program.